http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com --
ADMIT it. You are a total failure as a parent.

A grownup who, despite many tense
minutes of grunting, squinting, praying,
cursing, banging and maybe even a glance at the
instruction book, cannot make your child's
high-tech dog do anything but bark.

Who else would come up with such a diabolical toy? A dog that
looks like it's going to be more fun than Lassie and R2D2 rolled
into one, but ends up bankrupting the parents even while
propelling the kids into their pillows, crying their TV-soaked hearts
out, not because the dog is an impossibly temperamental piece of
electronic engineering, but because mommy/daddy/formerly
beloved relative said the thing was going to beg and wag its tail,
and instead it's lying on the floor, jerking sporadically, looking and
sounding like Keith Richards on acid-laced Milk Bones.

Or at least like he scored some bad kibble.

And that's provided you figured out how to get batteries into the
toy at all.

In truth, the really infuriating thing about these programmable dogs
is not that none of us has figured out how to make them obey. It's
that we suspect everyone else has.

"It's under the bed," she finally confessed. "Every once in a while
the kids take it out and try to make it walk."

Does this work?

"No."

Why not?

"Because we're morons."

That was a fun conversation. And I had several more just like it as
I discussed the pricey pooches with others, including a salesclerk
at Toys "R" Us. He confided that most folks seem to have wised
up since last year's robot dog craze, and now no one is going
anywhere near Boomer, the $65.99 puppy with infrared
technology. Nor are they flocking to Boomer's friend Flash, the
high-tech turtle.

Now there's a riveting toy.

My friend Dale, who went to Harvard and Yale and is a big-shot
lawyer, usually has all the answers. But not when the question
involves her son's robot dog.

"Do we get rid of it, since we can't make it work?" she spends
hours - possibly billable - wondering. "Or keep it because it's
really not broken?"

For now, she has been applying the universal parental
compromise: Shove it in the closet.

Those who get up the nerve to actually boot out (not up) their
techno dogs enjoy one great reward: no longer having to listen to
them. Chris McLemore of Texas still recalls the electronic pet his
sister got - and neglected - last Christmas.

"It was dead before we rang in the new year. And the worst part
was that it made noises, but she couldn't get the sound to turn off,"
Chris said. "So we had to listen to the thing slowly die. I actually
felt pity for it."

Well, not me. Our family's mechanical mutt had his 15 minutes of
almost-fun, and I'm happy to report he is now sleeping with the
fishes.